Diablo 3 – First Time Playing From A WoW Player

World of Warcraft was one of those games a few years ago that you had to play. You like MMOs? Play WoW. You want to be addicted to a game? Play WoW. You want to lose hours/days/weeks of your life being totally engrossed in raiding? Well, you know where I’m heading. I’ve really started banging out the hours on Diablo 3 on my console; a game I had previously tried for a very short period on my laptop, but never got too engrossed with – luckily as at this time, my subscription to World of Warcraft was keeping Blizzard in the black. I consider Diablo 3 the first game on the PlayStation 4 that I’ve fallen in love with – and it’s due to how much depth there is in the game.

I’ve now worked my way through it’s story acts and although at times I played with friends, it was enough to keep me engrossed, but not too much to want to shut myself off from everyone else. As with every Blizzard piece of work, the video stories were amazing and added so much to the game – the best example of this is the video accompanying Act V – a brilliant video to kick start The Reaper of Souls expansion pack.

Here’s a few reasons why I’m really enjoying it:

Storyline

This was a great factor for me enjoying the game. I often joined in my other friends’ games over PSN, but it’s great that I could jump into their story and go back to my own and easily be able to see what part I was up to before I left. Although the story wasn’t very encompassing, it was easy to keep up with the main characters and players in the story.

Leveling system

I knew I’d like the leveling system as long as it was somewhat like that of WoW. The levels were obviously a bit easier to go through than for WoW, but that’s to be expected. However, it was good to be able to go through the levels a bit quicker and not require days upon days of attention; I remember WoW expansions almost taking a week to just get up 3 levels for me, due to the lack of time I had compared to others. The rewards for leveling were both rewarding in terms of flicking through them and in terms of making you play through the next level to get your desired rune.

Difficulty

The ability to go up and down a difficulty is a great idea; one that more games should encorporate – especially if they have as many difficulties as Diablo does. The game has ten different difficulty levels, reaching a maximum of Torment 6, which means monsters have nearly 9000% health over normal, deal 2540% more damage, with extra rewards of 1600% in both XP and gold! It really rewards the players for playing on higher difficulties, as well as actually being visibly more challenging.

Loot

There’s two things at work here – firstly, the loot system is so much more rewarding than many games… *cough* WoW/Destiny *cough*. There’s lots and lots of drops, to the point where you seem to spend half your life comparing currently equipped gear to the drops! Secondly, it has easy methods for comparing the main stats – It gives arrows on whether it’s an improvement over your equipped on health, weapon damage and life regen. Plus… treasure goblins. They’re awesome! Watch the video below to see our encounter with treasure goblins! They drop a shit ton of gold and loot, plus they’re hard to kill and they genuinely make you smile with a stupid childish grin whilst you’re chasing them down! PLUS, they sometimes drop clouds to lead you to Whimsleydale… awesome.